by Farley Mowat
To escape blood vengeance from Hallbjorn’s kin, Snaebjorn set sail in a ship of which he was half-owner. Rolf the Redsander owned the other half. They each took twelve shipmates. Snaebjorn’s companions included his foster-father Thorodd. Rolf ’s main companion was Styrbjorn. . . .
They sailed away to Gunnbjorn’s Land but when they reached it Snaebjorn would not let them go ashore by night. However Styrbjorn left the ship and found valuables hidden in a grave mound. Snaebjorn hit him with an axe, and knocked them out of his hand.
They made a stone hut for themselves and were soon snowed in. In the spring they dug themselves out.
One day while Snaebjorn was working on the ship, and his foster-father Thorodd was in the hut, Styrbjorn and Rolf killed Thorodd. Then the two of them slew Snaebjorn.
They sailed away after that and reached Halgoland [in Norway], from whence they returned to Iceland, where Rolf and Styrbjorn were killed by Sveinung, who in turn was slain by Thorbjorn. . . .
Snaebjorn and Rolf sailed west to spend a season hunting in east Greenland while things at home cooled off. That they found a grave worth robbing makes it apparent they were not the first arrivals on that coast.
Although the sources recount Erik’s life in Iceland and, later on in Greenland, in some detail, they have surprisingly little to say about the epochal “voyage of discovery” itself. We are left with no more than bare bones, and all too few of those. What follows is an abstract of my reconstruction of events, as given in Westviking.2
We begin with the actual saga account:
Erik told his friends he planned to go to the land Gunnbjorn Ulf Kragesson had encountered when he was driven westward across the sea. He put to sea from Snaefells Jokul and approached land at the glacier called Blaserk. Then he sailed south along the coast on the lookout for habitable [or inhabited] country.
He spent the first winter on Eriksey [Erik’s Isle] near the middle of the Eastern Settlement [the southern fiords]. The following spring he went into Eriksfjord where he selected a site for a homestead. That summer he sailed to the western wilderness where he stayed for a long time, giving names to many places.
He spent the second winter at [another] Erik’s Isle beyond Hvarfsgnipa; but in the third summer went north to Snaefells and into Hrafnsfjord. Believing he had reached the end of Eriksfjord, he then turned back and spent the third winter on [that] Erik’s Isle near the mouth of Eriksfjord. The following summer he sailed back to Iceland.
Erik’s ship departed from the Snaefells Peninsula crewed by twenty or thirty supporters and slaves. The supporters would have been drawn from among his close friends and relatives and, as we suspect, may have included a man named Ari Marson, whose wife was Erik’s first cousin. The freemen aboard were armed with swords, spears, and battleaxes. Kegs of skyr and butter, and bundles of dried fish were stowed in the holds under sealskin tarpaulins. For the rest, the crew would be dependent on “country food.”
Having rounded Cape Farewell, Erik soon reached “habitable country,” but the surviving sources have nothing to say about that. All we are told is that he wintered on an islet off what would later become the Eastern Settlements of Norse Greenland. A passage in Islendingabók written two or three hundred years after the event does, however, provide us with a little additional information.
The land which was called Gronland was discovered and settled from Iceland. Erik Rauda was the name of a man from Breidafiord who went there and took possession of it. . . . Both east and west in the country they found human habitations; parts of skin boats, and tools made of stone, from which we understand that the same kind of people had been there as inhabited Vinland, whom the [latter-day Norse] Greenlanders called Skraelings.
To understand this account we must remember that tenth-century Norse did not think of Greenland as the discrete entity we know it to be. They thought of it as a ribbon of land which began far to the north and east of Iceland; ran south as far as Cape Farewell; then turned north to the head of Baffin Bay, which it rounded; to run south down the east coasts of Ellesmere, Devon, and Baffin islands.3
Islendingabók says Erik found “human habitations” and artefacts “both east and west in the country.” Archaeology tells us that, at the time of Erik’s visit, Dorset-culture natives (the Skraelings of the Icelandic scribes) did indeed inhabit the west side of Baffin Bay; but no natives lived on the Greenland side of it, nor had any done so for several hundred years. Who, then, could the builders of the habitations Erik found in the east of the country have been? I submit that they were Albans.
There is no way of knowing whether any of the dwellings were still occupied when Erik arrived in Greenland, but it would seem that he found only abandoned houses.
The Norse were brave men—none braver—but as Erik’s Vikings worked their way up the west Greenland coast, I imagine they would have felt oppressed, even intimidated, by an apparently uninhabited landscape. What could it mean? Had trolls spirited the inhabitants away? Had they been destroyed by the gods, or by some mysterious human enemy? Or had they perhaps withdrawn to some secret place from which they were even then readying an attack upon the would-be raiders?
I expect Erik’s ship gingerly poked her nose into one eerily empty fiord after another, the tension steadily mounting, until something untoward occurred.
One grey day the raiders found themselves far down a particularly extensive fiord. Erik dispatched his long boat to reconnoitre its narrow, inner reaches. Near the head of one convoluted arm, the boat’s steersman spotted what looked like a drift of smoke.
Nosing the boat up on a gravel beach, the crew stepped warily ashore. They had gone only a few paces when a dozen howling men leapt out of the concealment of a patch of birch, showering them with arrows and sling stones.
The attack came so unexpectedly that the landing party panicked, broke for the shore, leapt into the boat, and rowed furiously for the safety of the open fiord. Perhaps they did not realize until too late that one of their number had been wounded and left behind.
That something akin to this imagined incident did take place seems indicated by the subsequent behaviour of Erik’s band.
As autumnal squalls began sweeping down from the inland glacier, the Icelanders holed up on a small island at the mouth of one of the southern fiords. In this exposed place they prepared to spend what would have had to have been a most uncomfortable winter.
In rejecting the relative comfort and shelter available in any one of a multitude of places within the southern fiord complex, they were behaving as Vikings characteristically did when forced to winter in hostile territory. Rather than seeking out a comfortable winter haven, they chose a remote, outer island where they could not easily be surprised and from which they could make a swift departure to the open sea if things got desperate.
The Norse were not masochists. Surely Erik would not have selected this sort of a refuge (which is what he did in each of the three winters he spent in Greenland) unless he had reason to fear attack—not by wild animals, trolls, or spirits, but by human beings.
As the long night drew down and frigid gales screamed out of the north, we can imagine the Icelanders huddled together in their crowded, freezing hut on barren Eriksey with little physical comfort, and not much peace of mind. Regardless of whether they had as yet encountered any living Albans, the mystery of a mostly abandoned land would have haunted them.
The prospects for a profitable Viking voyage must now have seemed as bleak as the winter weather. There could, however, have been some solace in thinking and talking about the fine green country revealed to them in the inner fiords. It may even have been here, on this windscoured isle, that Erik envisioned a world inhabited by him and his kind over which he could be liege lord—virtually king of his own country.
The saga tells us:
The following spring he went into Eriksfjord where he selected a site for a homestead. That summer he sailed to the western wilderness where he stayed for a long time, giving names to many places.
When spring liberated him, Erik scouted to the foot of the greatest of the southern fiords where, we are told, he selected a site for the homestead that would be called Brattahlid. I have no doubt that he took careful note of the silent bulk of at least one, and probably several abandoned croft houses standing upon the chosen ground.
He did not linger in the fiord which would come to bear his name. It might be a fine place to settle—but the time was not yet. He had not embarked on this voyage as a settler but to enrich himself and his companions at other people’s expense. This he could not do until he found appropriate victims.
He looked for them to the northwestward. By the time he had travelled some distance beyond Godthaab Bight he must have realized that all, or most, of the inhabitants had abandoned Crona.
Where could they have gone? Where else but to that country which the Norse knew as Hvítramannaland or Albania?4
Erik took up the search, but evidently had not much more than a general idea of Albania’s whereabouts. Crossing Davis Strait, he seems to have roamed the Baffin coast for some undetermined distance “giving names to many places” but not accomplishing much else.
Mystified and frustrated, Erik returned to the east side of Baffin Bay.
He spent the second winter at Erik’s Island beyond Hvarfsgnipa. But in the third summer went north to Snaefells and Hrafnsfjord.
The second winter was also endured on an island called Eriksey, this one somewhere to the north of Hvarfsgnipa, now known as Cape Desolation.
It would have been another dreary winter. Women slaves would have had a particularly thin time of it. The men may have found emotional release in quarrelling. Recalling the bloody winter Rolf and Snaebjorn spent on Greenland’s east coast, we can believe that only Erik’s ready hand with sword and dagger kept mayhem in check.
The following summer Erik sailed north along the west Greenland coast. He may still have nurtured hopes of at least finding Alban hunting camps in that direction. Or he may have relinquished the possibility of finding anyone to rob and have concluded that if his men were to acquire wealth they would have to hunt it for themselves.
They sailed well into the old northern hunting grounds of Alban Crona. Hrafnsfjord was either Disko Bay or Umanak Fiord (perhaps both), beyond which lay an enormous bay filled with bergs. Sailing in continuous daylight, Erik went far enough to see the northeastern horizon transformed into a towering wall of ice—the greatest glacier face in the northern hemisphere.
This was Snaefells; and here he turned back.
Erik’s people survived their third and final winter of exile on the same isle where they had spent the first one; and this seems most peculiar. If Erik had been convinced by now that local people offered no serious threat to his safety, he would surely have chosen to spend this last winter in a place which promised some creature comforts, such as the site at the end of Eriksfjord where he had already hallowed land and intended some day to settle. That he did not do this suggests that a perceived threat must have existed, whether real or imagined, and one of sufficient magnitude to keep Erik’s war band barricaded on a grim little island through the final winter.
Although this reconstruction of Erik’s exile in the west fits the existing evidence, there are other possibilities.
It may be that the Alban evacuation of Greenland had barely begun, or had been only partly completed, when Erik appeared upon the scene. Instead of coming to a country effectively devoid of inhabitants, he may have found one still partially occupied, and that by an exceedingly hostile population. It may have happened to Erik in Crona, as had happened to Ingólf in Tilli, that he was unable to establish a proper foothold in a new land, and so was forced to roost on its fringes. It may be that, again like Ingólf, he had to return to his homeland and there assemble an invasion force before he could take possession. All that the sagas have to say is this:
Next spring Erik sailed back to Iceland, landing at Breidafjord. . . . The following spring he fought a battle with Thorgest and his men and Erik’s side got the worst of it. Later, peace was arranged between them.
That summer Erik set out to colonize the land, which he called Greenland because, he said, people would be more easily persuaded to go there if the land had a good name.
Wise men say that when Erik went out to settle Greenland, twenty-five ships sailed from Breidafiord, and fourteen of them reached Greenland. Some were driven back and some were lost. This was fifteen years before Christianity was established in Iceland.
There were many dissatisfied men in Iceland in those times. Some had arrived too late to find good land. Some felt it irksome to be beholden to overbearing chieftains. Others, involved in blood feuds, were feeling their necks. Still others were simply hungering for some good, old-fashioned rapine. Such men would have responded with alacrity to a proposal that they band together and take the “green land” in the west for their own.
As the spring of 985 advanced, ships began congregating in the havens of Breidafjord and Borgarfjord. Each carried about thirty people, including women, children, and slaves. There would have been room for only a few cattle on this initial voyage. The bulk of the livestock would have remained behind, to be ferried over later.
On a June day judged to be propitious according to the omens, the fleet set sail; but either the omens lied, or they had been badly misinterpreted. The ships were struck by a terrible calamity. Almost half were sunk or sent limping back to Iceland.5
The disaster, which was perhaps the consequence of an undersea volcanic eruption, certainly caused heavy casualties. Nevertheless, the surviving vessels made good the passage, with the result that for the succeeding four and a half centuries, Greenland (or at least the southern portion of it) would belong to the Norse.
If any Albans had remained in Crona until Erik’s invasion fleet arrived, they would have lingered no longer. Hurriedly freighting their vessels, they would have slipped away to the west leaving Crona to new owners and a new fate.
CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX
ARI GOES TO ALBANIA
LANDNAMABOK, THE FOUNDATION STONE OF Iceland’s Norse history, tells us that some time during the tenth century an Icelander by the name of Ari Marson
sailed on the ocean to Hvítramannaland [the land of White Men], which some call Irland Mikla [Greater Ireland], lying away west in the ocean near Vinland the Good, which is said to be VI days sail due west from Ireland.1 Ari could not get back from that country, and was baptized there.
Hrafn the Limerick Trader, who had spent a long time at Limerick in Irland, was the first to tell this story. Thorkel Gellirson said that Icelanders who had heard Earl Thorfinn of Orkney tell the tale, claimed Ari had been recognized in Hvítramannaland, and could not get away but was held in much honour there.
To which the Annals of Greenland, an eleventh-century Norse chronicle, adds:
There is, as stated, south of the part of Greenland which has settlements, wastelands, unsettled regions and glaciers; Skraelings, then Markland, then Vinland the Good. Next to it and a little beyond lies Albania,2 which is Hvítramannaland. Thither formerly were sailings from Irland. Irishmen and Icelanders there recognized Ari, son of Mar and Thorkatla from Reykjaness, of whom no tidings had been received for a long time and who had become a chieftain in that land.
Who was Ari Marson? The answer entails what may seem to be a somewhat tedious excursion into Norse genealogy, but one that is required in order to securely establish the authenticity of Ari’s extraordinary adventure in the west.
Landnámabók tells us Ari Marson was descended from Ulf the Squinter, one of the founding fathers of Norse Iceland.
Ulf . . . took the whole of Reykness between Godfjord and Goatfell. He had for wife Bjorg, daughter of Eyvind Eastman and sister to Helgi the Lean. Their son was Atli the Red, who had for wife Thorbjorg, sister of Steinolf the Low. Their son was Mar of Reyknolls, whose wife was Thorkatla, daughter of Hergils Hnappraz. Their son was Ari [this is followed by the account of Ari’s western ve
nture which we have already read]. . . . Ari had for wife Thorgerd, daughter of Alf of the Dales; and their sons were Thorgils, Gudleif and Illugi. This was the race of the Reyknessings.
Ari’s ancestry is as weighty as any in Iceland and as well attested. It links him with some of the most notable people in the island’s history, including Eyvind Eastman and Aud the Deep Minded, the grande dame of Iceland’s founders.
It also links him to future generations. Thorkel Gellirson (mentioned in the Landnámabók account) was Ari’s grandson. Thorkel was the uncle of Ari Thorgilson, author of Íslendingabók and probably of Landnámabók which together form the very cornerstone of Icelandic history.
Thorkel Gellirson lived in the first part of the eleventh century and was widely travelled and well informed. He is known to have provided his nephew, Ari Thorgilson, with much of the information contained in the histories, including, we can be sure, the remarkable story of how his grandfather, Ari Marson, ended up in Albania, which, by the way, is simply the Latinized name of Alba.
Ari Marson’s bona fides are impeccable and his story as unassailable as any from that period. Yet most historians have chosen to ignore or to reject it. One can understand why. If one accepts Ari’s story, one must concede that the Norse were not, after all, the first Europeans to “discover” North America.
Erik Rauda and Ari Marson were both born around the middle of the tenth century. Both grew to maturity in the western reaches of Iceland. They were related by marriage through Ari’s wife, Thorgerd, who was Erik’s first cousin. They must surely have known one another. They may well have been comrades, even though (or perhaps because) Ari belonged to a long-established and wealthy family and Erik was a latecomer with few resources other than his own skills and ruthless ambition.